[URBANTH-L]CFP: Delivering and Sustaining the Urban Renaissance (graduate)

[Angela Jancius]

DELIVERING AND SUSTAINING THE URBAN RENAISSANCE: Graduate research on the reconstitution of local governance, built environments and public spaces

Organisers: Ian R. Cook and David Christoffer Lier, University of 
Manchester 

NOTE: We are having two sessions and we've had eight fantastic abstracts 
so far and would like two more papers. If you would like to present please 
send an abstract of 250 words or less to Ian R. Cook 
(ian.cook at postgrad.manchester.ac.uk) ASAP and no later than Wednesday 
October 18th 2006. 

http://www.wun.ac.uk/rcc/pdfs/Urb_Renaissance.pdf

Delivering and/or sustaining an urban renaissance seem to be the core 
objectives for local governments across towns and cities throughout 
Western and Eastern Europe, North America and beyond. In order to do this, 
local government services, public spaces and built environments of towns 
and cities are been reconstituted and refunctionalised. In some senses, 
towns and cities and their elites are following similar strategies and 
undergoing similar processes. Government services are becoming 
entrepreneurial, efficiency-driven and business-led; public spaces are 
being cleansed, secured and privatised; and the built environment is 
increasingly catering for gentrified upper-middle class residency and 
consumption practices. Indeed, these services, spaces and buildings are 
often increasingly geared towards actual and potential visitors, investors 
and upper-middle class citizens and consumers. Seducing these groups and 
unlocking their finances, it is argued by policymakers, will facilitate 
the beginning or continuation of urban renaissance. This session, 
sponsored by the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), will examine the 
particular strategies utilised to (hopefully) deliver and sustain an urban 
renaissance in various towns and cities throughout the world. Papers 
within this session can explore any one (or more) of the following 
empirical and theoretical issues:

- What is meant by an 'urban renaissance'?
- Who governs, delivers and finances the urban renaissance?
- What regeneration and social control policies and tactics are used?
- How and why has local governance, public spaces and built environments 
been reconstituted and refunctionalised?
- How have urban elites sought to continue an urban renaissance?
- What opposition, contestation, negotiation and contradictions are 
bounded up in the urban renaissance?
- How successful has the urban renaissance been? Who has benefitted and 
who has not?
- How adequate are existing academic theorisations of these 
transformations?